


I Remember (Speaking in Tongues Remix)

by poisontaster



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Pre-Series, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-04-07
Updated: 2006-04-07
Packaged: 2018-02-14 13:30:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2193594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisontaster/pseuds/poisontaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Everything good in his life can be boiled down, in one way or another, to that summer.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Remember (Speaking in Tongues Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inlovewithnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/gifts).



> Thanks to Mona1347 & Romanticalgirl for the beta. They did what they could with me.

Kara's hair smells like summer and the sea.

He thinks that's maybe what drew him to her, over and above the bright burning flame that's _Kara_ herself. He thinks he should feel guiltier about that. But he doesn't.

Everything good in his life can be boiled down, in one way or another, to that summer.

***

He doesn't even remember how it came up. Words are mostly lost in the _feel_ of the time; the stomach-churning pressed-flat feeling of: _he's leaving. He'll be gone._

Just like Dad.

Only two years separate him and Lee, but they're the crucial two; the years that the fragile and weather-beaten ship that was Bill and Carolanne finally foundered and broke for good even though it would take everyone a good while longer to swim free of the wreckage. He was a last ditch effort, a salvo in the dark and every moment he spends in Bill Adama's stiff and uncomfortable shadow serves to remind him of that fact.

It surprises him not at all that Lee's following in the old man's footsteps—though he doubts Lee sees it that way. He'll probably do the same before too long, a stamp that goes beyond the building blocks of genetics and into the ephemera of Blood, all capitals intended.

Doesn't mean Zak has to like it, though.

***

He remembers lying in the hammock in their back yard. They were renting a tiny, perpetually cold house in an uber-fashionable neighborhood that year, but it had an equally tiny yard and the hammock, which is what counted to Zak.

He doesn't remember how long he's been lying there, however, when Carolanne comes and lays her hand on his forehead. Her skin feels hot against his, so it's been a while. And it's getting dark, long blue shadows of twilight. So…a long while.

"What is it?" she asks, her upside down face cocked and creased with concern. His stomach and throat sour and he looks away.

"Nothing," he answers and his voice comes out rusty and furred.

Her lips press thin, the way they do when she's argued with their father, but she only ruffles his hair and goes back into the house, the sliding door closing behind her with a rubbery _snickt_.

Zak watches the trees wave and shift, signaling to each other; messages in words he doesn't understand.

***

"So I was thinking…"

Different day, same hammock. He imagines it's getting a Zak-shaped groove, and the thought pleases him. Zak cranes his neck and arches his back a little to look up and behind at Lee walking towards him.

"Give the man a Magnate," Zak quips. He wants to smile, but doesn't, quite. "Actually _thinking_?"

Lee's hand spiders over his face and shakes him, ending with a ruffle of his hair. Zak sits and makes a show of looking huffy, combing it out with his fingers. But really he's relieved. Finals and the long wait for acceptance letters made Lee tense and irritable, though Zak's never sure what Lee thinks he has to worry about.

It still shows in the faint blue shadows under bluer eyes and the way his bones are hard and brittle looking over hollowed cheeks. His smile is real, though, and Zak feels something loosen in his chest, a little flutter like gossamer wings.

"How do you feel about a trip?" Lee shifts on his feet, always restless, as if he can't figure out whether to stand stiff and proud or relaxed and off-center. Zak wants to just tug Lee down next to him on the hammock and put an end to it, but he doesn't.

"A trip," Zak echoes, unsure he's heard correctly.

"Yeah. The two of us. Before I go. I was thinking Libron, to granddad's."

Zak shivers and suddenly feels very distant from himself and Lee. "For how long?"

Lee shrugs. "Couple weeks at least."

Zak turns his head and looks past Lee at the shadow of Carolanne, moving through the house. "Yeah, sure," he says finally. "What else am I doing, right?"

Lee gives him that half-puzzled look, the one that's Zak's alone, the one that means he doesn't quite know how to take what Zak's just said. He laughs anyway. "Exactly."

***

The men on the transport mistake them for recruits. Zak watches Lee preen under the attention, but when Lee catches Zak looking, he rolls his eyes, ironical. Zak grins back and pretends his stomach doesn't burn at the easy way Lee laughs and jokes with the soldiers, speaking a language he only half understands.

Zak—who's been sharking Triad games in the back corridors of his school for _years_ —lifts a pocketknife off a j.g. a little too full of hot air and self-importance. Lee whoops and claps his shoulder and for the rest of the night, he feels a little like he drunk too much ambrosia, a little like Lee's hand is burned onto his shoulder in heat, a tattoo or brand. As if any such thing is necessary.

He recounts the game again and again, mostly to see that little gleam of remembrance and pride in Lee's face. He gets so caught up in it, though, that he doesn't notice when the gleam ferments and rots into something else.

"Oh, for frak's sake, Zak, he _let_ you win!" Lee snaps, dumping his bags on the plank floor with a thump.

He's so taken aback, so shocked at the sudden pivot of Lee's mood, he can't even say anything. It's like all his veins opened up and spilled out, robbing him of everything including words. Instead, he just carries his own luggage into the narrow white painted room that juts off to the side of the cottage like an afterthought. He can't see the ocean from it, only endless shifting gulfs of sand and hardy olive colored grass.

Turning gulls scream and cry in interlocking circles and aimless swoops, shrill shrieks like squabbling girls in another room.

***

When he finally comes out, Lee is gone.

When Lee comes back, Zak is lying across the railing of the front porch, his head pillowed on his folded hands. Lee reaches in one of the bags and pulls up to show the long glass neck of an ambrosia bottle. He's wind and sunburnt already and he's grinning like he's the one that's fifteen. Looking at him like this, carefree like he never is, Zak can't help but grin back and it feels like the sunrise.

This, at least, is easy to understand.

***

The ambrosia goes down like water now, sweet and warming him all the way through. It makes him feel boneless and lazy, sprawled across the rug. Lee's hand is messy in Zak's hair, fingers crooking every time he laughs.

And he laughs a lot, the two of them trading old stories and memories like chips across a Triad table. _Do you remember the time we stole all the Midwinter decorations from the school? Do you remember when we ate all the feast candy and threw it all up? Do you remember when I took Aunt Phoebe's car and crashed it and you had to come get me? And you lied to mom and said it was you?_

Lee laughs and Zak laughs with him, but not for the same reasons. It's okay. It's still good.

***

Zak's seen time go fast, like water slipping through your fingers. Zak's seen it go slow, dragging and slurring until every second is palpable, distinct as snowflakes. But he's never felt time like this; time that bends and twists and bubbles, flowing swift and smooth on the outside and from the inside it almost seems like it could be standing still. Moments that he could collect like beads on a string.

Two weeks.

***

_The water is bitter cold after the mellow heat of sand and sun; Lee jumps on his shoulders, holding him down under the waves. He tastes salt and knows that its trace will linger on his skin—and Lee's—for the rest of the day._

They build a bonfire on the beach, a really huge one that lights up the sky and sand. They lie in the sand between it and the sea, passing a bottle back and forth between them until it's emptied. Zak lets it fall out of his fingers and watches the stars until they bleed together.

"I don't want things to change," he says, when he's too drunk to stop himself and he thinks Lee is drunk enough it might be okay.

"Things always change," Lee says. But he puts out his hand and tangles his fingers in Zak's.

***

Towards the end, they hike down the beach and up the steep shale cliffs, throwing themselves face down in the thick scrubby grass.

"I think I remember this place," Zak says thoughtfully, tilting his head back to squint up into the sun. "When we were here before. When we were little. We came up here."

"Yeah," Lee says after several moments. He rolls onto his back and shades his eyes.

He wasn't very old then; what Zak mostly remembers from that day is Lee behind him, ready to catch him if he should slip and fall. He remembers being so conscious of Lee that he fell anyway, cutting himself on—of all things—a jagged piece of shell that had no business this far from the tide line. He remembers the blood and the look on Lee's face.

"We didn't tell anybody where we were going and Mom thought we'd been kidnapped or something." Lee muses. He has white crinkles at the corners of his eyes where the skin hasn't tanned.

Zak buries his face in the grass and laughs. "She almost killed us." He doesn't really remember that part, but it certainly sounds like something Carolanne would do. Or rather…she would be furious and white-lipped with Lee and half-strangle Zak with frantic hugs and smother him in lipsticked kisses. "But before that, when we were up here…" His stomach rolls, liquid and warm. "That was fun."

"We pretended we were pilots. And the Cylons came back. And we had to save everybody."

Zak turns his head and regards Lee through his eyelashes, wondering how Lee can simultaneously remember so much and so little. Wondering if that's another thing Lee gets from Bill. "We did too," he reminds Lee. "We were the best. Unstoppable."

"We were a team." Lee nods and misses it when Zak's teeth tighten behind his lips.

"You think that'll really happen?" He doesn't want to ask the question, but at the same time he does, to gouge himself open on it like it's an unexpected piece of shell.

"That the Cylons will come back?"

 _Lords of Kobol, Lee—you can be so godsdamn **clueless** sometimes_. "No, stupid," he says keeping his voice light. He flips on his back and rolls his eyes and bleeds a little more into the sand and grass. "That we'll fly together."

It's a dream, he knows. An oracle's smoke dream. But…they all have to have their dreams, don't they?

"Oh, that." Lee reaches over and ruffles Zak's hair. "Of course we will."

In Lee's blithe, easy voice, Zak can tell it's not the truth. He knows just as well that Lee can't. Another marker of the Adama bloodline. "Yeah," Zak throws one arm over his face so Lee can't see his eyes and makes himself smile. "I think so too," he says.

But he doesn't. Not really.

After a while, he levers himself up on his elbows and watches the grass write impermanent glyphs that are erased almost as soon as they're called into existence. Once upon a time—perhaps on that same trip—he remembers Carolanne whispering into his ear that these are the messages of the gods, a family surely as comprehensively frakked as his own.

He wonders idly what they still have to say to each other, after all this time.

**Author's Note:**

> Once upon a time [](http://inlovewithnight.livejournal.com/profile)[**inlovewithnight**](http://inlovewithnight.livejournal.com/) and I entered into an agreement to remix one of each other's fics. This is what I wrote. The original fic seems to no longer be available, which makes me incredibly sad, but I'm still tremendously proud of this remix. Despite my overall bitterness about BSG in general.


End file.
